THE LEAD

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein holds a press conference to announce that 12 Russian intelligence officers have been indicted for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election. (Fox News Screen Grab)

(July 13, 2018) Desperate to head off a possible accommodation between President Trump and President Putin, which could result in a principled approach to a viable peace, the British, Robert Mueller, and the “resist” holdover forces in the U.S. intelligence community and news media have staged a trifecta of calculated information warfare operations within the last 24 hours to sabotage the summit.

In the United States, two interrelated events occurred. First, embattled FBI Agent Peter Strzok appeared before a joint House hearing on Thursday to claim that the Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight Committees were doing “Putin's work” for him by continuing to examine the British and Obama Administration/Democratic Party origins of Russiagate. Strzok's charge, obviously choreographed with Congressional Democrats, was greeted by them with Jacobin cheers and endlessly cycled in the news media. The Democrats otherwise sought to obstruct the discredited FBI agent's testimony by any and all means necessary to the delight of the fawning news media and the “resist” social media universe. Strzok was the lead FBI case agent on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Trump Russiagate investigation. The Justice Department's independent Inspector General found that Strzok's prioritization of the Trump Russiagate investigation over the Clinton email investigation was not free from bias, an inconvenient fact largely glossed over in Thursday's staged event. Strzok and his mistress, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe counsel, Lisa Page, exchanged daily texts vowing to stop Trump's election, disparaging Trump's supporters, and declaring themselves the saviors of the nation from the catastrophic danger they saw in Trump.

Less than 24 hours later, Robert Mueller today indicted 12 members of Russia's GRU military intelligence branch for allegedly hacking the DNC, John Podesta, and various other Democratic Party entities, in order to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections against Hillary Clinton. Russia's alleged cyber activities are, of course, the central premise of Robert Mueller's entire witch hunt against President Donald Trump. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer immediately demanded that Trump cancel his meeting with Putin based on the indictment.

Reached today, after conducting a quick review of Mueller's indictment, former NSA Technical Director William Binney declared the document to be “a fabrication.” “The only actual forensic investigations performed on available data regarding ‘hacks’ of the DNC are independent investigations assessed and approved by a group of us at the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity,” Binney noted. (See, Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence, and A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack.) He continued, “the FBI never even bothered to examine the DNC computers, relying instead on the DNC and Atlantic Council cyber contractor Crowd Strike for its evidence. Our analysis demonstrated that the Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks personas were created inside the United States. Our analysis also fully demonstrated that the transfer of the information was consistent with a download to a thumb drive, not transmission over the internet. Separate and apart from the VIPS analysis, Ray McGovern and I have consistently said that available data surrounding charges regarding ‘Russian hacking' suggest that the CIA's Vault 7 Cyber weapons arsenal enabling false attribution and ‘tell-tale' signs in Cyrillic and other ‘obfuscation' may be at work in a least some of this. Former Director of National Intelligence and former CIA Director John Brennan's benighted views on Russia seem also to be in play over the past several years. Suffice it to add that, despite our assessment of John Brennan's cyberoperations and false attribution programs at the CIA, Brennan's geopolitical fixation on Russiagate, and despite our work with independent forensic analysts (or perhaps because of it), we have never been contacted by Robert Mueller or any Congressional investigative committee."

Since members of the GRU are unlikely to present themselves to the U.S courts, nothing in Mueller's indictment will ever have to be actually proved in a court of law. The indictment does demonstrate that substantial time was spent in creating a “save the appearances” version of a crime for the credulous after the Obama intelligence community's initial presentation of an “assessment” of the hack never achieved general credibility beyond very gullible and technically challenged members of the U.S. press corps and the U.S. Congress. Moreover, with all the hullabaloo attached to Robert Mueller's stunt, the fact remains that the DNC and John Podesta emails revealed a stunning and irrefutable truth: Hillary Clinton and the DNC were rigging the election against her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders. So much for “interference.”

The third element of this coordinated assault on the prospect of peace was the discovery of a bottle or vial of the so-called Novichok nerve agent allegedly used to poison former British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The bottle was discovered at the home of Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess in Amesbury, England. The British went on an international rampage around the March 4, 2018, Skripal poisoning claiming that it was Putin conducting a murder of a long-retired British spy on British territory in some form of retaliatory action, demanding war-like sanctions against Putin and Russia. When their claims failed to achieve substantive credibility, even with the British bioweapons lab, Porton Down, Rowley and Sturgess appeared as new victims of the nerve gas poisoning on June 30 and Sturgess subsequently died. The British press is filled with the imputation that the found vial will somehow be traceable back to Russia, a fact which eluded the original Skripal hoax.

These are desperate ploys and will not survive scrutiny outside their wave-like propaganda effect on the public mind. Strzok's portrayal of himself as Captain America, hating Putin, hating Trump for being rational about Putin, hating the smell of Trump supporters, deriding the intelligence of every Trump voter, defending the country against the destabilizing destruction represented by Donald Trump, yet somehow able to “follow the facts, wherever, they lead” simply did not sell. As even CNN commented, his own texts, demonstrating both his overt bias and willingness to shape his official actions in that light, were fatally “damning.”

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